Live Free Or Dye

I spotted the first silver strands on my dark head when I was about 28. When I gave birth to my second child, at the age of 30, the strands were becoming more prominent. I didn't mind it until about two years later when the strands really began taking over. I was only 32 and I felt old. So...I colored...and colored...for years. I always maintained that I would stop when I was 45 and, alas, I did. Three years later my hair is, I'm guessing, about 75% gray.

I like the color: a shiny silver that looks bright white on top in sunlight (as in the photo). I get a lot of compliments on it, albeit sometimes backhanded. Other women sometimes say things like: oh, aren't you brave! Or, it must of been hell to grow out (which it was). Interestingly enough, men are the most complimentary and supportive. But to my other silver-haired female counterparts, I'm just another comrade.

In Anne Kreamer's book Going Gray she discusses a test of her sexual appeal to men. She set up two accounts on Match.com. In one she displays a photo of herself with colored hair; in the other a photo with gray hair. She noted with surprise that the gray-haired photo received twice as many responses from men as the colored hair pic. Anne Kreamer, like I, speculates about why this may be. I think it's because middle-aged men are not the shallow dudes they were in their youth. I see this in my male friends, my ex-husband and my current partner. They value honesty and colored hair is anything but honest. Besides, most artificial color is too harsh and hardly looks natural at all; especially when brunettes try to find a version of their natural hair color, as I did. I doubt I fooled anyone.

Everywhere I go I look for women (and men sometimes) who, like me, wear their hair the way nature intended: gray, silver, platinum or salt-and-pepper. Of course, in my neck of the woods there is a disporportionate number of women who don't color. The hilltowns of Franklin County, further down the road into Greenfield and further still to what we fondly call The Happy Valley, aka The Five College Area (Mount Holyoke, Smith, Amherst and Hampshire colleges and the University of Massachusett), there are many proud silver heads to be found. So many, in fact, that I hardly stand out.

Not so in other places I've travelled: San Francisco, Zurich, London, Lisbon and Montreal, among them. Gray hair on a woman under 65 seemed a rarity to me. In these places, I did stand out. In my home country of Portugal, my well-intentioned middle-aged cousins haven't passed up opportunities to encourage me to resume coloring my hair. In that country, it seems as if there is a hair salon on every street corner, (right next to a bakery). It is their husbands who tell me flat out in front of their wives, not to color my hair; that it looks fine the way it is.

So, does it matter to me what the women think of my hair? Sure. Will it change my resolve to keep my hair natural? Nope. I'll just hold my head a little highter and let my freak flag fly, as David Crosby once sang in Almost Cut My Hair.

P.S.